Even if all the heavens were parchment, and all the forests quills,
If all the oceans were INK, as well as every gathered water,
If all the earth's inhabitants were scribes and recorders of INITIALS....

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Nursing My Baby While Weaning Myself

As the mother of a newborn, I spend many hours
a day sitting on the couch nursing my baby. This doesn’t come as a surprise –
this baby is my fourth, so I’ve been through this before. But for the first
time I am now nursing with a smartphone, a device I can hold in one hand for
hours on end, so that time passes seemingly unnoticed and I find myself, to my
consternation, oblivious to the miracle of new life at my breast.

I
am trying, as much as possible, to wean myself off my phone while
breastfeeding. Aware of the shallowness of the smartphone’s trance-inducing
temptations, I seek instead to immerse myself in the deeper pleasures of
fiction. Jess Walter writes in Beautiful Ruins about a character who takes a
data hit from her smartphone, and I can attest that those pings have an
intoxicating lure. In Station Eleven, one of Emily St. John Mandel’s characters
complains about “smartphone zombies” who walk around glued to their screens,
oblivious to the world around them. And yet according to a modern Israeli
rabbinic commentator, a woman who has just given birth to a daughter—as I
have—is supremely alive, since not only did she create new life, but she has
created a form of life that has the potential to give birth to new life
someday, as all baby girls do. How tragic it would be to miss out on these
moments of peak vitality.

Ever
bent on self-improvement, I have started setting daily “reading goals” so that
I don’t immediately reach for the phone. Each day I strive to read one chapter
of whatever nonfiction book I’m in the middle of (currently David Brooks’ The
Road to Character, which works well, as each chapter can be read as a
self-contained essay about, well, self-improvement). This usually lasts for
about two breastfeeding sessions. I also make sure to learn a page of Talmud a
day, keeping up with the daf yomi cycle, reading aloud to my baby so that she
may imbibe Torah with her mother’s milk. Then I reward myself with as many
pages of fiction as I can get through, often reading aloud the passages of
dialogue so that my baby—who is alone with me for most of the day while her
three older siblings are in preschool—can get accustomed to the cadences of
human speech. She is not yet smiling, but I am pretty sure she gurgles happily
at the funny parts.

And
what about the smartphone? Now I keep it in the bathroom, where I check it each
time I pee or change a diaper. I like to think I’m in good company. The midrash
relates that the Talmudic sage Shmuel used to study astrology in the bathroom
because it was the only place he could not learn Torah. Like Shmuel, I
prioritize my reading and learning – Torah, fiction, and nonfiction come first;
e-mail and Facebook can be left for the bathroom, where I am less likely to
linger in their thrall. Unlike Shmuel, though, I don’t bother checking my
horoscope; thanks to my beautiful baby daughter, I’m already starry-eyed
enough.